Apple Raises Garden Walls

New iPhone, mobile OS and cloud service debut, as the company looks forward to a future beyond conventional use patterns.

The launch
of the iPhone 4S, iOS 5 and iCloud Oct. 4 was a milestone for Apple. For
starters, it fell the day before the death of Apple's founder and board
chairman Steve Jobs, who had been the individual most closely identified with
the company's success in mobile devices.
Beyond
that, however, the company's latest mobile OS shows how hard the company is
pushing voice control as a new frontier for the user interface. The purchase of
Siri almost a year and a half ago gave Apple a leading position in voice
recognition and artificial intelligence that competing platforms such as
Android will find difficult to match. Additionally, the company's mobile OS is
finally losing its apron strings as of this release, as it no longer requires a
Mac or Windows PC for backups, restores or system updates. This feature alone
may silence the remaining corporate naysayers.

The iPhone 4S
is, cosmetically speaking, a rebranding of the company's iPhone 4. However, if
the specs are any indication, the 4S is actually far ahead of its immediate
predecessor, with a dual-core A5 processor and significantly improved
photography and video features. The image sensor in the iPhone 4S is said by
Apple to have 60 percent more pixels than the iPhone 4's sensor. The lens
aperture is also larger, at f/2.4, and the new iPhone can record 1,080p high-definition
video, with image stabilization and better image quality in low-light
conditions. The iPhone 4S is available in three storage sizes: 16GB, 32GB, and
new for this model, 64GB.

It was scheduled
to become available Oct. 14, and this model will be close to a true
"worldphone" with support in the same device for Code Division Multiple Access
and GSM networks. At launch in the United States, the authorized carriers will
be AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
Apple's iOS
5, which we plan to review in an upcoming issue of eWEEK, will offer direct access to the Camera and Photos applications
from the lock screen, as is currently the case with the iPod application.
Twitter will be a built-in application for the first time, and users will be
able to use the new iMessage service to share text messages, photos and videos
with other iOS 5 devices. The new iOS version will be offered as a free
software update for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, as well as the iPad, iPad 2 and
the third- and fourth-generation iPod touch.
Although
it's nice of Apple to extend the benefits of iOS 5 to users of the 3GS, I'm not
certain how well that's going to work in practice, given the debacle that was
iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G. Although the
company's engineers have undoubtedly put forth their best efforts on this
aspect of the operating system, I have a sneaking suspicion that we may see the
"supported" tag disappear early next year, if the real iPhone 5 does, in fact,
shake off the manufacturing issues that have been rumored for it.
The free
iCloud service was also scheduled to launch Oct. 12, and it's clearly an
extension of Apple's walled-garden approach. It will require an Apple device
running iOS 5, a Mac running OS X Lion, or a PC running Windows Vista or later.
The service will include 5GB of free cloud storage for backup, mail and
document storage. Apps, books and audio, and visual media will not count
against this limit. Additional storage will be available in a tiered price
structure; roughly speaking, the annual cost will be $20 for every 10GB of extra
space.
Although
executive and other high-profile users have until now been the prime movers
behind the deployment of iPads and iPhones in business environments, the new
ability in iOS 5 to update over-the-air instead of through a USB connection is
expected to make IT's support chores less burdensome. So we're eager to see how
well devices running the new mobile OS work with the device-management tools
built into the company's Lion Server.
The artificial
intelligence and voice recognition features that Apple acquired with its 2010
purchase of Siri will finally debut in iOS 5, and although it's showy, the
demos you're seeing in the company's advertisements are less than inspiring. Listing
Italian restaurants in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood is about as
difficult as finding deep-dish pizza in Chicago.
I'm also kind
of put off by this claim of Scott Forstall, Apple's vice president of iOS
software: "What we really want to do is talk to our device." I guess that's
true, if you're the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek with no social skills.
Personally, I've never quite seen the point of voice control unless I'm
driving, but it will be interesting nevertheless to see what developers do with
Siri.
But one has to
remember that all this came about thanks to Apple's success with the iPod,
which certainly redefined the market for mobile media players. Even Microsoft,
following its failure with the can't-give-them-away Zune, threw in the towel on
its attempt at siphoning off customers from Apple's ecosystem.
And in the end,
the ecosystem is what it's all about. Anyone who wants to put a dent in the iOS
ecosystem has their work cut out for them for the foreseeable future.

P. J. Connolly began writing for IT publications in 1997 and has a lengthy track record in both news and reviews. Since then, he's built two test labs from scratch and earned a reputation as the nicest skeptic you'll ever meet. Before taking up journalism, P. J. was an IT manager and consultant in San Francisco with a knack for networking the Apple Macintosh, and his love for technology is exceeded only by his contempt for the flavor of the month. Speaking of which, you can follow P. J. on Twitter at pjc415, or drop him an email at pjc@eweek.com.